Office stands, bald-headed, in solidarity

There are so many bald people in my office — more today than when I left on Friday.

Some are bald for fashion or out of resignation to the inevitability of genetics and age.

Another dozen — men and women — shaved their heads over the weekend in solidarity with a colleague whose chic blonde hair was stolen by chemo.

She maintained the illusion of a mane with wigs and hats for a few weeks before giving up what was left to the clippers. She was scared of being bald – maybe more scared of bald than chemo.

You can tell she feels the love and support of our co-workers, laughing as they streamed in this morning. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said again and again.

And they shouldn’t have to.

There is something perverse in the notion that the temporary loss of hair can strip the confidence and power of a woman who faces personal danger and unbelievable physical challenges seemingly without hesitation. Climb Long’s Peak on a day’s notice? No problem. Mountain bike in the dark to where people are stranded by flood? Sure thing. Bivouac inside fire lines? Absolutely.

But the hair.

It’s a societal issue that apparently has been dogging us since, well, forever. Scholars blame the Victorians in particular for mythologizing women’s hair and its power as both the warp and weft of family and society. Arizona State University Prof. Rose Weitz, in her book “Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives,” puts it in a contemporary context: “Our hair is one of the primary ways we tell others who we are and by which others evaluate us, for it implicitly conveys messages about our gender, age, politics, social class and more.”

But why is the message, when it is told by a woman’s head, mostly negative?

My cousin the firefighter-EMT-doctor lost her hair during medical school. She’s excellent at her job and has never once practiced medicine when she wasn’t cue-ball bald. And yet somehow she feels that excellence doesn’t convey in the treatment room. She wears a wig “to keep from scaring the patients.”

I’m as guilty as the next member of society. The first time I saw the good doctor wearing a bandana, instead of a wig, on an especially scorching summer day, I immediately thought she was sick and started looking at her collarbone for a chemo port. I didn’t think she was beautiful, like musician Sinead O’Connor in the 1980s, or glam, like Natalie Portman in the movie “V for Vendetta.” I thought she was dying.

I blurted out something like “OMG, why can’t we just be kind to each other about our stupid hair,” and promised myself that I would try to be less judg-y.

But undoing the lessons of cultural literacy around hair that have been taught since childhood is a difficult task. (And I’m pretty clear that little kids don’t care what our hair looks like or if there is any. I offer as Exhibit A, a video of one of my newly bald colleagues introducing her bald self to her toddler. The baby was unfazed, touching her mom’s fuzzy head and then asking for a book.)

Even the powerful TV personality Joan Lunden, who appeared bald on the cover of People magazine last week, admits that she needed a spray tan on her head to feel more comfortable after she shaved before beginning chemo to treat a particularly nasty form of breast cancer.

We can’t escape the magical qualities of hair, both in lore and real life, Weitz explains in her book. “Growing directly out of our bodies, our hair often seems magically emblematic of our selves. In many traditional cultures, witches can’t hex nor healers heal without a lock from the hair of their victims or patients … This magical use of hair reflects an underlying biological reality: Each person’s hair is unique … Controlling our hair helps us control our lives, and loss of control over our hair (through aging, illness, disability, religious commitments, imprisonment or anything else) can make us feel we’ve lost control over our lives.”

Perhaps that is the lesson of the voluntarily bald men and women in the office around me. They can’t control our friend’s health, but they are doing what they can to make her feel better.